I don’t really use facebook anymore so couldn’t care less; but so happened to log in today to change my password and saw this on my front page.
I don’t really use facebook anymore so couldn’t care less; but so happened to log in today to change my password and saw this on my front page.
Your situation is different from mine. Facebook might not be popular in your country anymore but it’s the largest social media platform in mine. Young people don’t use SMS for communication in my country anymore. The majority has switched to Facebook Messenger now. SMS is only for carrier messages and verification codes. Even if I did get like one or two friends to use SMS again (unlimited SMS not included in phone plans by the way), how do you propose I solve the problem of Messenger group chats? I need them for family, for friends, for college and for work. How do you propose I solve that?
Here people use WhatsApp, not Facebook messenger, but the idea is the same. I left WhatsApp last year. My dearest friends and family have installed Signal after I did. They haven’t left WhatsApp but they use it to contact me. We have group chats on Signal. If colleagues need to reach me I tell them they can sent me an SMS or join Signal. They mostly just send SMS. I used to be in a group chats from my 2 jobs. Luckily I don’t necessarily need to be in either of them, it’s mostly used for trading shifts and there are other ways to do that. Important communication goes through email.
When one method of communication is the norm it is obviously very difficult to move away from it, and for some people it will feel almost impossible. We shouldn’t deny that there is a choice, because there is, but obviously for some it will be a lot easier than for others. I was in the lucky position that it felt possible, and it worked out great. I am very relieved that I am part of fewer group chats now. They’re quite a burden actually. I hope in the future when things shift a little further from the current norm, it will be possible for you as well.
It’s fucking absurd that it’s 2023 and SMS still costs money on mobile plans that also have internet.
SMS messages take less than 150 bytes of data. It’s hard to even explain how little data that is compared to everything your phone does that is IP based. With ATM and Ethernet, just the TCP and IP frame overhead is over 50 bytes, and TCP requires 3 packets just to start a socket, so you can literally send a max length SMS message in about the same data as the TCP overhead of an idle connection. Yet they charge people per message. If you were charged for every TCP socket setup your phone made you’d go bankrupt*.
*not really, that was figurative hyperbole.
Youve missed the point, it WAS that popular here, that changed nothing. If I sent an SMS , they got it. If YOU send an SMS, they’ll get it.
You can do whatever you like, but you’re intermixing want vs need. So you can either CHOSE to send an SMS or you don’t. But you don’t NEED to. May be more convenient, but you need to decide whether to make like arguably easier, or maintain slightly more privacy. That’s your choice, but don’t kid yourself that it’s not a choice you have.
I used to be nice to use privacy invading convenient things, it was great to tell my phone to remind me of things when I left work etc. but my privacy is more important than that convenience. Using a known abusive data minor as main method of communication is about as bad as it gets for me, at that point, all my privacy efforts are a waste.
I don’t spit in the face of my own privacy to appease others, if you chose to, that’s fine. Just own it.